I did not mention that my laptop is a Libretto 100 and the floppy is the official Libretto boot floppy drive. The system IS configed to boot off the floppy 1st. And it is, as without the floppy, it boots off the drive into DSL installed on the HD. Also I DID build a floppy with the bootfloopy.img and that boots no trouble. This is trying to build from the pcmciafloppy.img so that I can access the Toshiba official PCMCIA CDrom... Oh, and there is little to set BIOS-wise on the LIbretto.

No the problem SEEMS to be that the floppy imgs for booting DSL (and or the DD command) does not clear out a MBR set on a diskette previously used for Win.

Oh, I have used a diskette and loaded tomsrbdt on it, and that starts booting no trouble, but it made the diskette a 1.7Mb format, and after the initial phase, it cannot read from the Libretto 1.4Mb floppy controller. Then I dd the DSL img onto that same diskette, and I get the NTLDR error....

Problem is my box of floppies is a mess of ones I have used and not used.

I will probably just grab a handful and keep going until one works. Of course the system I use to make the floppy is in my basement NOC, and the laptop I am working on is in my upstairs office....

I hope I will eventually hit a winner (ie 'fresh' floppy), but it seems there is a magic formula to really make a bootable DSL floppy image even if the diskette was previously formatted for use with Win.